Monday, December 21, 2009

Instead of whining about the MLB regular season becoming more meaningless, why not make it completely meaningless? Put all the teams into a new playoff system.
1. Reduce the regular season to 140 games: 20 games against seven opponents.
2. Seed the teams according to regular season record. Based on 32, not the actual 30 teams currently in MLB, this could be done with eight team east/west divisions in each of the current two leagues. Teams should play only in their divisions.
3. Give a big advantage to the highest seed(1 v. 8), especially in round one, maybe all home games, maybe give number one a win to start the five game series.
4. There would be three series of five games. That would decide the four division winners. Max 155 games, min 149 games to that point.
5. Division winners would then play a seven game LCS.
6. World Series.
Cool.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

How about allowing teams to borrow outs from a future inning in the same game? Of course that team must pay back: the future inning would lose the number of outs borrowed.
Radical, uh?
The only flaw I see is if the defensive team gets out of a jam by retiring a batter for the third out, then the offense announces that it borrowing from the next inning and the defense could have gotten a double play for four outs ... I'm sure one of you readers can suggest something.
Of course, a team may not borrow from innings that may not be played: extra innings.
Cool, uh?

New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra won three AL MVP awards: 1951, 1954, 1955. We have home/away splits for 1954 and 1955. Yankee Stadium was 344 feet from home plate in straight away right field. Berra batted left handed. Had Yogi been a righty batter like DiMaggio, he probably would not have hit so many homers. Yogi was not Ruth or Gehrig.